One common criticism of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the brittleness of the solutions it produces. The suggestion is that AI systems have not scaled well beyond the relatively limited domains to which they have been applied. In recent years there has been a marked trend in the AI community towards real-world applications. Techniques, inspired by AI's wider ambition to produce more intelligent machines, are not only gaining acceptance in other fields of scientific research, but also in areas such as business, commerce and industry. Moreover, there is a tendency for the techniques themselves to be developed, tested and refined within such applications. The contemporary theme seems to be, if a technique represents a genuine advance in software engineering, then by definition it has commercial advantage. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the application of genetic algorithms (GAs). What has marked out as GAs as compared to other techniques is the surprising speed with which commercial organizations have shown an interest. One of the reasons for this is that GAs seem to offer an extremely effective, general-purpose, means for dealing with both complexity and scale.
This book presents a snapshot of some of the GA research taking place within Europe. In summery, the book attempts to emphasise the diversity of the GA approach, by presenting detailed descriptions of GAs used for real-world optimization and for complex modelling problems.